Post for Myself so I'll Remember This, Sorry!

I love Wednesdays because I only have one class in the evening. Plus, the class is great. They're maybe ages 8-10 or 11 and they're really fun kids. I've talked about the class before--how it's mostly boys and there's this hilarious kid named Jimmy2 who says the weirdest stuff. Anyway this class just loooooves board races (where two kids have to run to the board and write something). They get incredibly into it and often fall over on the floor laughing in hysterics/moaning in agony, depending on whether they win or lose. It's a blast watching them...it's too bad I have to often kill the mood and make them do a listening activity or something afterwards. But I try to play games as much as possible.

Anyway today we played a board race and at the end of it, one team had 25 points and the other had one measly point. The losing team was disappointed, and as the energy was slowly dying down, Jimmy2 (on the losing team) sighed and said, "Teacher, I need to go to the hospital." My co-teacher and I cracked up. His timing and the way he said it was perfect, not to mention the fact that it was surprisingly fluent. I know it's not funny when you weren't there but trust me, this kid would crack you up.

Then after class I was talking to one of my other students--Polly--and she was telling me how she wants to be a writer when she grows up. Now this is not a high level class. We just started learning verbs in the present continuous tense (He is driving, She is sleeping...) and now we're talking about occupations. But through her best effort she was able to convey to me that she wrote a sequel about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ("princess and seven little boys"). Then she brought me out into the hallway to have another teacher translate everything else she was unable to communicate. Basically, she wrote this story about what happens to Snow White after she meets the prince. It was 1900 characters long but she had to cut out about 200 and then she submitted it to a competition and got 4th place. Wow! I was impressed. She's probably 9 or 10 years old, so that's pretty awesome! I'm proud of her, especially for trying to talk to me in English! I'm a foreign teacher at a cram school, so when students actually WANT to tell me something about themselves when it's NOT classtime, I'm very excited. And she talked to me for like ten minutes, so I was very happy.